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How SEO + UX Can Thrive Together

Is Ignoring UX Killing Your SEO Effectiveness?

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It’s a common scenario at companies everywhere:

The UX team resides in one corner of the office, staring intently at their Macs with the window shades drawn, while the SEO crew is busy bubbling around and talking about “KPIs” and “algorithm updates” in another corner. And rarely do their two paths cross, except maybe to exchange pleasantries at the coffee pot.

Today’s content-first and user-defined digital landscape demands a different perspective. In short, a disconnected approach is a broken approach.

If we’ve learned anything over the years as both a creative and SEO agency, it’s that taking the “easy” way and going for page views translates to two things, time after time: disappointed users and no sales. Attention spans are on the decline, and this is never truer than with always-fickle web users. Put another way, if you can’t solve your customers’ problems quickly, they won’t be your customers for very long. By addressing your audience’s needs and questions better than the competition, you’re ensuring that good things will happen.

In this whitepaper, we’ll show you how to bring together these two seemingly disparate elements of your marketing strategy so that you’re not only optimizing pages for the almighty Google, but for your customers, as well.

You Have A UX Problem

01

“I invented the term because I thought human interface

and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all

aspects of the person’s experience with the system

including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the

physical interaction, and the manual.”

—Don Norman, while VP at Apple, 1993

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Don Norman coined the phrase UX (User Experience) when serving as VP of the Apple Advanced Technology Group in the 1990’s. And our view is that people have forgotten what UX means.

The term UX has become so widely used that we bet you’ve lost the meaning of the original definition.

In short, it’s the entire way that a customer interacts with your company online. For an SEO professional, forget what you have learned. This is your job, after all.

For our purpose, we would like to offer this definition:

What Is UX?

02

UX is about achieving a business objective by meeting the needs of the

customer, with simplicity.

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Most people assume Google is only looking at your website’s content for rankings; i.e., the words on the page. But some might be surprised to know that Google also looks at the structure of your content and the overall user experience. In effect, UX is actually a factor in your ranking.

As the far-and-away leader in search for decades,

Google knows a thing or two about the kinds of pages and sites that satisfy their searchers. These sites tend to have the following traits in common. They:

• Are easy to use, navigate and understand.

• Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query.

• Are professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers

• Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content.

Earlier this year,

Moz looked at the correlation between ranking and engagement rates such as bounce rate and time on site. They found sufficient evidence to suggest an indirect – but very real – link between bounce rate and rankings. In other words, if your user is having a bad experience and they’re bouncing, then there is a real-world impact on your SERP positions. By improving elements such as time on site and number of pages visited, you’re creating the right environment to get a lift in your rankings.

Usability and user experience might be second-order influences on search engine ranking success, but are still vitally important. These signals provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a sign of higher quality.

Why Is UX Important To SEO?

03

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Google, of course, keeps the cap sealed tightly on its bottle of Algorithm Secret Sauce. However, it doesn’t take a Googleplex engineer to see that the search giant is looking at user engagement as well as performing other on-page content analyses to determine the rank of a page. Some of the confirmed signs of quality content Google looks for include engagement metrics, machine learning and linking patterns to and from your site.

Further, research tells us that users make split-second decisions on whether to continue with a site, saying,

"In sum, our study shows that designers should regard not only visual complexity, but also the factor prototypicality very carefully when designing a website. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may trigger a suboptimal first impression and impair users’ expectations."

Why Is UX Important To SEO?

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Start bringing SEO and UX together.

The simple answer is that the silos need to come down. SEO professionals need to realize that UX is their job, too. For an effective content strategy to work, your UX and SEO teams need to be fully aligned, working toward the same purpose.

You also need to use any and all tools at your disposal. As we’ll discuss, BrightEdge offers some game-changing resources such as the Data Cube to help you find intent-based keywords. Undertaking this effort is a bit like learning a new language: yes, there’s a steep learning curve at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it’s well worth the hard work. Specifically, you can:

Pick Up Easy Wins

1. Make sure your site speed is up to par. Nearly half of all Web users have been shown to abandon sites that take longer than two seconds to load, and 79 percent say they won’t return to a site that has loading issues, so site speed is critical.

a. Use free tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights

b. Image compression and optimization

c. Quality code

d. Great Servers

e. Learn the basics of UX measurement in Google Analytics

f. Test the site like a real user

Want A Happy Audience?

04

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Carrying Out Intent Based Search Strategy

2. Schema and SERP is UX. Schema doesn’t just tell Google what your content says, but, more importantly, what it means. A recent study showed that sites with markup rank, on average, four SERP positions higher than ones lacking schema markup.

a. Identify primary topics and questions that people are looking to answer when searching for a specific term, then create content that addresses the user’s needs.

b. Sometimes you can gain clicks with a lower page ranking by improving its visibility.

c. Make sure that your search listing captures the visitor’s attention while using language that encourages them to click your result rather than another.

Want A Happy Audience?

1. Get into the mind of your audience and speak their language, particularly if it involves specialized terminology.

2. Follow a process to unlock intent by answering questions that your audience has and anticipate their needs.

3. The process of focusing on search intent will lead you to prioritize your efforts. It is our observation that SEO teams typically want a short cut to this process. That’s because this is hard. It requires you to reach across your silos to involve creative teams in the process. Across the board, companies need to spend more time here.

4. By spending more time analyzing user intent, you will figure out how to best accommodates your customers in their time of need. You can spend less effort trying to rank words that are less relevant and not a match for audiences searching the term. This will lead to more focus on driving real impact and conversions and not just a high volume of irrelevant traffic.

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5. So, where do you start? First of all, follow a framework like this one below. This provides you with the major questions you need to think through as you follow an intent-based approach, which gets you into the mind of your audience. It also helps you anticipate their needs based on the terminology they’re using when they perform searches.

Want A Happy Audience?

Creating Long-Term Collaboration

1. Lead with data not opinion. SEO professionals should practice restraint in the use of data. More is not always more impactful. Choose the data carefully and make sure that senior leadership can see the story in the proof points. Also, never lead with “We should” or “I think” when giving the rationale for a decision. This is the trap for SEO professionals who are typically outgunned when they have to explain against creative teams more artful in their storytelling.

2. Get UX literate. Of course, no one expects SEO professionals to be full-fledged UX experts, but they should have more than a passing familiarity with basic UX principles. Keeping up with UX trends through blogs such as UX Booth and Usability Geek will lend you an air of credibility when speaking about user experience with clients.

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3. Find a way to speak the same language. As the impact of SEO is better understood within organizations, there is a way to get a seat at the decision maker’s table. SEO and UX, while different disciplines, both serve the same marketing purpose. Often time teams with different disciplines are saying the same thing through a different lens. It’s up to the SEO team to bring designers into the process earlier. Explain the impact of choices made with only one discipline in mind.

Want A Happy Audience?

4. Automate workflow between teams. The BrightEdge platform provides ways to make the principles in this whitepaper come to life.

5. Data Cube: For research on intent-based search, there’s no better tool that BrightEdge’s Data Cube. With its custom engine that processes 100 terabytes of data each week, Data Cube gives marketers insight that can power their content marketing strategies.

6. BrightEdge Campaigns: Plan for integrated campaign success, get metrics to understand your campaigns, tap into a powerful planning calendar and more with BrightEdge Campaigns.

Focusing on the user is what good marketing is all about.

Because Google continues to focus on UX as a ranking signal, it’s time to get prepared or risk falling behind.

To that end, as the marketing profession grows more and more complex, the jobs of the past will become obsolete. The wall between development and UX skills are now blended. UX designers who code and coders who can design are now the skills in vogue in the marketplace.

Why would SEO not follow suit? Odds are, those SEO professionals who strive to bridge the gap will get more attention, more resources and get the attention of the C-Suite. Those who take the time to understand user intent, lead with data rather than opinions and train their focus on the user experience will be in the pole position – and so will their clients.

Next Steps

So. Now you know what UX is. What will you do with this knowledge? We sincerely hope you’ll test this information for yourself and put it into action. When you’re ready to get started, we urge you to check out our SEO + UX Best Practices Checklist here.

Sources

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2404197?hl=en-GB

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38315.html

https://moz.com/blog/do-website-engagement-rates-impact-organic-rankings

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-schema/

Conclusion

Reno · San Francisco · Las Vegas · 775.883.6000 · noblestudios.com